The Most Beautiful Thing
by Thrawn13
Summary: Apollo is faced with a near-death experience and he realizes that the gods are not so all-knowing as they seem to think. One-shot, written for the Life and Death Challenge in Querincia. Enjoy!


**A/N: Hey there folks! So I am in a challenge forum called Querincia and one of the challenges is to write about life or death. This is based on Life and it's shortness. The poem is of my own making. Based during ToA.**

 **Apollo's POV:**

"Apollo, hurry up! You are seriously so slow!" Shouted my 'wonderful' slaver, Meg.

I grunted, straining my leg muscles and lowered my head, "I'm… trying!" I shouted. I risked a glance behind me, the storm spirit was slowly gaining ground, and I was winded. I grinned at my own joke, at least I hadn't lost all of my godly powers.

I should probably explain, I, Apollo, _former_ Olympian god, am being chased by… wait, this could make a good haiku! I cleared my throat, 'ah, never mind.' I am being chased by a wind spirit. The former god of the sun, music, poetry, and Afghanistan dinners, was running away from a lowly (or not so _lowly_ ) storm spirit! The shame! Even the upstart Percy Jackson was well on his way to being better than the one, the only… Lester Papadopolous.

We kept running, I am not sure how my legs didn't give out, adrenaline probably, but it was close. We made it into a less open space and crawled into a little outcrop of rock about three feet high and four feet deep. The rock was a bit moist and slippery but we squeezed in. Meg stretched out her fingers and made grass and weeds grow out of the ground in front of the entrance so that we would be less visible. Meanwhile, I was shaking, both from exhaustion and – I am sorry to say – from fear. I kept thinking about what might happen, I could be killed now, the thought was scary, terrifying. To think that all this time I had been a god with not a worry or a care in the world. Now I could see why it was that humans rushed through life, they couldn't possibly know when they were going to die, so they had to cram as much as they could into scarily short lives.

Back when I was a god, I hadn't had to think whether or not I would be able to see the sun – _my own domain_ – rise again. Now, it was all upside-down, everything I had thought that I understood was thrown into the hat and shaken up. All of us gods, we thought we saw everything, but really, we were blind to what really mattered. Nobody had really noticed when the nature god Pan had passed on, but now I understood as much as he did. Pan had always seemed more above the rest of us, more knowledgeable, now I knew why.

If my life could end today, then I needed to make it worthwhile, I needed to stand up and do something. 'Maybe one day I will write a suicide awareness poem, knowing all the things I do now,' I thought. I glanced at Meg, she was peering under the rock and into the dark forest around us. I grabbed my bow and quiver from my back and took an arrow.

I stepped out of our hideout and strung an arrow, I chanted,

 _Oh, silver night, my_

 _Sister told me one time_

 _That you, of all the celestial beings_

 _Are the most beautiful._

 _But now that I have_

 _Finally grown up,_

 _I see that you were wrong,_

 _For, the most beautiful thing_

 _Is not an outwardly beautiful_

 _Object, no,_

 _The most wonderful thing in all the land…_

… _is life._

With that I released the arrow at the approaching spirit, praying to Artemis to make the shot fly true. It did, splitting through the air with a low whistle and then a sudden, literally heart-stopping thunk of impact. There was a scream of winds as the monster dissolved, then silence.

Naturally, Meg had to ruin the moment and say, "Well, we better get moving again, or are you too tired to move?"

I just rolled my eyes and turned to follow her through the wandering forest path.

 **A/N: I hope you guys like this, I had fun writing it, that's for sure! As I said, this is for a challenge in the forum called Querincia. That was the first poem I have written in YEARS, so tell me how you liked it. Constructing criticism is welcomed.**


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